I hear frogs
A while ago I got a fairly breathless piece of other-the-transom reporting from Reznet News about how insert-adjective it is that the Hero Twins are visiting (insert Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana) here. I see the same cruft leaking out of the various online properties of the two campaigns.
We spent '06 and '07 in Iowa and west, and while the fiction of "native outreach" may translate into a few percentage points in a Democratic primary that yeilds, oh, nearly a 50-50 split of a dozen delegates, which is the only place the "50 states strategy" has the slightest possible meaning in the primary, rather than the general election contexts, the thing that northern tier voters, independent of party, really care about is water.
The Mississippi and tributary locks, and the relatively infrequent barges up and down river, drive the draw-down over all of the Missouri watershed, affecting hydro cost, even availability, irrigation, and recreation. Carbon particulates drive down the Rocky snow pack, and therefore the time and volume of spring melt.
For either of the Hero Twins to win west of the dry line, they need to get religion, and the GOP's values aren't religion, only water is.
For Tribes to win from the one-time presence of the Hero Twins west of the dry line, they need to get ahead of the whole water policy issue super-basket, from cows to corn to current to coal, because the only way anything useful will happen is if the "50 states strategy" is actually run in the Fall, with the surviving Hero Twin and her, or his party, promising to deliver water, not mined out of the future, but cut back from the also-red down-stream states which are east of the dry line, and which are obscenely wasting it to float grain barges.
Indians won't win more than the photo op if a Hero Twin picks off a spring delegate here and a spring delegate there, and water isn't floated as the solvent in which Republican values dissolve, corroded by oxides of hydrogen, throughout the fall cycle.
